alt Hacker NewsU+237C ⍼ Is Azimuth
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I prefer to think these characters have an antimemetic field that causes anyone who learns their true meaning to forget shortly after.
context: a follow up to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31012865 (2022), a post which started the hunt for the mysterios origin of this unicode symbol.
This is a fantastic discovery! Displaying azimuth in my ascii-side-of-the-moon [0] sounds useful, but then I would need to explain the symbol. I am displaying altitude/elevation below horizon, but there doesn't appear to be standard symbol for it. I checked the tables linked from article and there doesn't seem to be a symbol for it.
Maybe this is the opportunity to invent and suggest a symbol for Altitude?
One of the interesting things about Unicode is how many symbols exist that almost no one encounters in normal software.
Every once in a while you run into something like this and realize the standard is not just for text encoding but also a kind of archive of specialized notation from different fields.
It makes you wonder how many other symbols are sitting in the table that are still mostly unknown outside the niche communities that originally needed them.
“RIGHT ANGLE WITH DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW”: https://utf8-playground.netlify.app/237C
> it can, of course, be turned sideways to measure an azimuth with respect to an arbitrary meridian
Ah, of course :)
I was wondering how much information was being lost whenever a font designer re-created that without knowing what it's supposed to be. It turns out they all put the arrow through the corner of the right angle which adds confusion by making it look like 3D cartesian axes. One of them made the zig-zag a curve which would be completely wrong by the sextant reason. But I guess this is how symbols and language drift over time.
The photos of the symbol catalogs are incredidble. You really have to admire the precision printing they did in the early 1900s. All those glyphs were created by hand. I'm not exactly sure what sort of lithography process was used (I can't imagine they weren't casting them in lead), but there was definitely nothing digital about it. The results are amazing.
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I didn't know that this is a mystery?
A lot of old German sailor maps (e.g. from the Hamburg or Bremen maritime museum exhibitions) contain Azimutal angle descriptions. The globe on an azimutal map is projected from the North Star in the center.
This way you could more easily calculate the angles you would need to use the Sextant (which was focused on the brightest star, the North star). They also used circles (the tool) to calculate relative speeds, current drift etc with it.
I thought this was kind of common knowledge, as a lot of museums have that sorta thing for children in their exhibitions to try out.
Great find — Satisfying to know ⍼'s origin story.
This reminds me of another Unicode block with ancient origins: the 64 I Ching hexagrams (U+4DC0–U+4DFF). Unlike ⍼, their meaning has been documented for 4,000 years — yet they carry their own encoding surprise. Unicode actually follows the traditional King Wen sequence: U+4DC0 is ䷀ (Heaven, #1) and U+4DC1 is ䷁ (Earth, #2). Interestingly, this is different from the binary Fu Xi arrangement formalized by Shao Yong (邵雍, 1011–1077), where ䷁ (000000) comes first and ䷀ (111111) last — the very diagram that captivated Leibniz in 1703 as a mirror of binary arithmetic [1][2]. Two valid orderings, encoding two different philosophies of where to begin: with pure creation, or with pure potential.
By the way, DNA also produces exactly 64 codons (4³ = (2²)³ = 2⁶) — the same number. Some have even noted functional echoes: DNA has start and stop codons that initiate and terminate translation; the hexagrams have corresponding structural counterparts [3]. Probably coincidence. Probably.
[1] https://leibniz-bouvet.swarthmore.edu/letters/letter-j-18-ma... [2] https://leibniz-translations.com/binary [3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/78369.The_I_Ching_and_th...